The Wicked MarquisOppenheim, E. Phillips (Edward Phillips)
General
The Wicked Marquis
Oppenheim, E. Phillips (Edward Phillips)
Detective and mystery stories; Fiction
"Yes, you're in the setting all right, Letty," he declared, "and yet
you are rather puzzling. Just now you look as though you only wanted
the crinoline and the little curls to be some one's grandmother in her
youth. Yet at that picture show the other night you were quite the
most modern thing there."
"It's just how I'm feeling," she confided, with a little sigh, standing
back and surveying her handiwork. "I have that rare gift, you know,
Robert, of governing my personality from inside. When I am in this
room, I feel Victorian, and I am Victorian. When I hear that Russian
man's music which is driving every one crazy just now--well, I feel and
I suppose I look different. Here's Meg coming. How well she looks!"
They watched the motor-car draw up outside, and the little business of
Lady Margaret Lees's descent carried out in quite the best fashion. A
footman stood at the door, a grey-haired butler in plain clothes
adventured as far as the bottom step; behind there was just the
suggestion of something in livery.
"Yes, Meg's all right," Sir Robert replied. "Jolly good wife she is,
too. Why don't you marry, Letty?"
"Perhaps," she laughed, leaning a little towards him, "because I did
not go to a certain house party at Raynham Court, three years ago."
"Are you conceited enough," he inquired, "to imagine that I should have
chosen you instead of Meg, if you had been there?"
"Perhaps I should have been a little too young," she admitted. "Why
haven't you a brother, Robert?"
"I don't believe you'd have married him, if I had," he answered
bluntly. "I'm not really your sort, you know."
Lady Margaret swept in, very voluble but a little discursive.
"Isn't this just like Bob!" she exclaimed. "I believe he always comes
here early on purpose to find you alone, Letty! Who's coming to lunch,
please? And where's dad?"
"Father should be on his way home from the Law Courts by now," Letitia
replied, "and I am afraid it's a very dull luncheon for you, Meg. Aunt
Caroline is coming, and an American man she travelled over on the
steamer with. I am not quite sure whether she expects to let Bayfield
to him or offer him to me as a husband, but I am sure she has designs."
"The Duchess is always so helpful," Robert grunted.
"So long as it costs her nothing," Lady Margaret declared, "nothing
makes her so happy as to put the whole world to rights."
"Here she comes--in a taxicab, too," Sir Robert announced, looking out
of the window. "She is getting positively penurious."
"She is probably showing off before the American," Lady Margaret
remarked. "She is always talking about living in a semi-detached house
and making her own clothes. Up to the present, though, she has stuck
to Worth."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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